Helmut,
We are aiming to provide a new policy for JVM server status in a future release. In the meantime there is an existing CICS policy system rule for BUNDLE enable status - https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cics-ts/6.x?topic=policies-policy-system-rules#policy-system-rules__bundle-enable-status - so you could use that providing the Java application or JVMSERVER were installed via a CICS bundle.
You're correct in saying CICS events does not support formating event data as JSON, so if Netcool requires the payload in JSON you will need to write a CICS custom event adapter to format the data using COBOL JSON GENERATE or similar, and then send it via a EXEC CICS WEB CONVERSE POST command. The custom adapter should be generic, relying on the event data and configuration, which means you could have several different events that all send data to Netcool.
IBM does have general application performance management tools that can monitor IBM Z applications, such as Instana - https://www.ibm.com/products/instana
If your enterprise already uses OpenTelemetry tracing to understand workloads across platforms, you may want to join the CICS Design Partnership as we are discussing more direct support for this in a future CICS version - https://opentelemetry.io/docs/concepts/signals/traces/ - if this is of interest send me an email.
Regards, Mark.
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Mark Cocker
Senior Product Manager, CICS TS, IBM
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Original Message:
Sent: Mon September 23, 2024 12:21 PM
From: Helmut Roese
Subject: CICS Events
Hi Mark,
thank you for taking care of my question.
The intention is to monitor the availability of an application and this in 2 ways. As it is a java application, we need a liberty JVM and would like to ensure, the JVM is up and running. And for the application we would like to have a heartbeat, which shows the availability of the application itself.
It would be nice to check the availability of the JVM with a policy, but this is an idea (CICSTS-I-2169) which is under future consideration. Therefore this can be currently handled only by a self-written program, which emits an event. And the application can use SIGNAL EVENT to produce events in case of problems or with a heartbeat.
Netcool is configured with a so called webhook which accepts https POST requests, but expects JSON messages. CICS Events currently supports only flat events or XML format. So I need an adapter at least on one side of the conversation. And it seems to me that this will be the self written event adapter which then also has to handle the http conversation.
Before I started researching I was hoping to get something "out of the box", but currently I am a bit disappointed...
Regards
Helmut
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Helmut Roese
Original Message:
Sent: Fri September 20, 2024 07:20 AM
From: Mark Cocker
Subject: CICS Events
Hello Helmut,
It would be useful to understand a little more about your use case.
- What information are you trying to send from the CICS application to Netcool?
- For example, are you going to capture business data from the application?
- Or perhaps this is to monitor the availability of the application, perhaps aligned to the objectives of OpenTelemetry?
- What protocol and formats is your Netcool environment setup to accept event data? For example, REST endpoint using XML or JSON, MQ queue, Kafka topic, ?
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Mark Cocker
Senior Product Manager, CICS TS, IBM
Original Message:
Sent: Thu September 19, 2024 06:09 AM
From: Helmut Roese
Subject: CICS Events
Hi all,
we would like to connect CICS with Tivoli Netcool for managing events. In CICS I find a description of the event types and formats as well as a description of event processing adapters. In Tivoli Netcool I find a description of the Event Integration Facility, but very generic. And from my current point of view I cannot bridge the gap in between these two.
Did someone use this scenario and might help me with some examples?
Many thanks
Helmut
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Helmut Roese
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